This recording represents a remarkable collaboration between two dissimilar but kindred creative spirits. Paul Griffiths--music historian, music critic, librettist and novelist--adopts an extraordinary device: his text uses only the 482 words spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." This could be a linguistic game, but read by the author with an actor's communicative skill, the result is grimly disturbing. With time and remembrance as "leitmotives," the hypnotic repetitions, unfinished, unpunctuated sentences and long pauses create an impression of mental disintegration. Addressing an unidentified companion, the speaker seems increasingly to lose contact with reality and, consumed by a nameless dread, to cling ever more desperately to inexorably fading memories. Frances-Marie Uitti's music cushions, underlines, and comments on the words with uncanny empathy for mood and atmosphere, from stasis to passion, melding modal, archaic, and improvisatory elements. Uitti, who has worked with many contemporary composers and written books on music and cello playing, has developed a novel technique that involves playing with two bows to produce sustained multi-voiced polyphonic textures. Here, she combines rhythmic and melodic passages with open-string drones; using three different instruments, including an electronic cello, she produces unusual, often unearthly timbres and sounds. The total effect is haunting, but eerily claustrophobic, as if your heartstrings were being pulled tight, choking off your breath. --Edith Eisler